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Thank you for coming. -------------------------------------------------------------------In the Year of our LORD Jesus Christ 2017

--As of January 20, 2017

A Sigh Of Relief With The Inauguration Of Donald John Trump as President of the United States of America, And Hope For A Prosperous Future For All United States Citizens (we who are a nation called "the melting pot of the world"). We shall be great and exceptionally great again.

Peace and Liberty. Semper Fidelis.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Guest Blog: George Friedman - Stratfor : "Redlines and the Problems of Intervention in Syria"

The civil war in Syria, one of the few lasting
legacies of the Arab Spring, has been under way for more than two years. There
has been substantial outside intervention in the war. The Iranians in
particular, and the Russians to a lesser extent, have supported the Alawites
under Bashar al Assad. The Saudis and some of the Gulf States have supported
the Sunni insurgents in various ways. The Americans, Europeans and Israelis,
however, have for the most part avoided involvement.

Last week the possibility of intervention increased.
The Americans and Europeans have had no appetite for intervention after their
experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. At the same time, they have not
wanted to be in a position where intervention was simply ruled out. Therefore, they
identified a redline that, if crossed, would force them to reconsider
intervention: the use of chemical weapons.

There were two reasons for this particular boundary.
The first was that the United States and European states have a systemic
aversion to the possession and usage of weapons of mass destruction in other
countries. They see this ultimately as a threat to them, particularly if such
weapons are in the hands of non-state users. But there was a more particular
reason in Syria. No one thought that al Assad was reckless enough to use
chemical weapons because they felt that his entire strategy depended on
avoiding U.S. and European intervention, and that therefore he would never
cross the redline. This was comforting to the Americans and Europeans because
it allowed them to appear decisive while avoiding the risk of having to do
anything.

However, in recent weeks, first the United Kingdom
and France and then Israel and the United States asserted that the al Assad
regime had used chemical weapons. No one could point to an incidence of massive
deaths in Syria, and the evidence of usage was vague enough that no one was
required to act immediately.

In Iraq, it turned out there was not a nuclear
program or the clandestine chemical and biological weapons programs that
intelligence had indicated. Had there been, the U.S. invasion might have had
more international support, but it is doubtful it would have had a better
outcome. The United States would have still forced the Sunnis into a desperate
position, the Iranians would have still supported Shiite militias and the Kurds
would have still tried to use the chaos to build an autonomous Kurdish region.
The conflict would have still been fought and its final outcome would not have
looked very different from how it does now.

What the United States learned in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Libya is that it is relatively easy for a conventional force to destroy a
government. It is much harder-- if not
impossible -- to use the same force to impose a new type of government. The
government that follows might be in some moral sense better than what preceded
it -- it is difficult to imagine a more vile regime than Saddam Hussein's --
but the regime that replaces it will first be called chaos, followed by another
regime that survives to the extent that it holds the United States at arm's
length. Therefore, redline or not, few want to get involved in another
intervention pivoting on weapons of mass destruction.

Interventionist
Arguments and Illusions

However, there are those who want to intervene for
moral reasons. In Syria, there is the same moral issue that there was in Iraq.
The existing regime is corrupt and vicious. It should not be forgotten that the
al Assad regime conducted a massacre in the city of Hama in 1982 in which tens
of thousands of Sunnis were killed for opposing the regime. The regime carried
out constant violations of human rights and endless brutality. There was
nothing new in this, and the world was able to act fairly indifferent to the
events, since it was still possible to create media blackouts in those days.
Syria's patron, the Soviet Union, protected it, and challenging the Syrian
regime would be a challenge to the Soviet Union. It was a fight that few wanted
to wage because the risks were seen as too high.

The situation is different today. Syria's major
patron is Iran, which had (until its reversal in Syria) been moving toward a
reshaping of the balance of power in the region. Thus, from the point of view
of the American right, an intervention is morally required to confront evil
regimes. There are those on the left who also want intervention. In the 1980s,
the primary concern of the left was the threat of nuclear war, and they saw any
intervention as destabilizing a precarious balance. That concern is gone, and
advocacy for military intervention to protect human rights is a significant if
not universal theme on the left.

The difference between right-wing and left-wing
interventionists is the illusions they harbor. In spite of experiences in
Afghanistan and Iraq, right-wing interventionists continue to believe that the
United States and Europe have the power not only to depose regimes but also to
pacify the affected countries and create Western-style democracies. The left
believes that there is such a thing as a neutral intervention -- one in which
the United States and Europe intervene to end a particular evil, and with that
evil gone, the country will now freely select a Western-style constitutional
democracy. Where the right-wing interventionists cannot absorb the lessons of
Afghanistan and Iraq, the left-wing interventionists cannot absorb the lessons
of Libya.

Everyone loved the fall of communism in Eastern
Europe. What was not to like? The Evil Empire was collapsing for the right;
respect for human rights was universally embraced for the left. But Eastern
Europe was occupied by Josef Stalin in 1945 following domination and occupation
by Adolf Hitler. Eastern Europeans had never truly embraced either, and for the
most part loathed both. The collapse freed them to be what they by nature were.
What was lurking under the surface had always been there, suppressed but still
the native political culture and aspiration.

That is not what was under the surface in
Afghanistan or Iraq. These countries were not Europe and did not want to be.
One of the reasons that Hussein was despised was that he was secular -- that he
violated fundamental norms of Islam both in his personal life and in the way he
governed the country. There were many who benefited from his regime and
supported him, but if you lopped off the regime, what was left was a Muslim
country wanting to return to its political culture, much as Eastern Europe
returned to its.

In Syria, there are two main factions fighting. The
al Assad regime is Alawite, a heterodox offshoot of Shi'ism. But its more
important characteristic is that it is a secular regime, not guided by either
liberal democracy or Islam but with withering roots in secular Arab Socialism.
Lop it off and what is left is not another secular movement, this time liberal
and democratic, but the underlying Muslim forces that had been suppressed but
never eradicated. A New York Times article this week pointed out that there are
no organized secular forces in areas held by the Sunni insurgents. The religious
forces are in control. In Syria, secularism belonged to the Baath Party and the
Alawites, and it was brutal. But get rid of it, and you do not get liberal
democracy.

This is what many observers missed in the Arab
Spring. They thought that under the surface of the oppressive Hosni Mubarak
regime, which was secular and brutal, was a secular liberal democratic force.
Such a force was present in Egypt, more than in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or
Libya, but still did not represent the clear alternative to Mubarak. The
alternative -- not as clearly as elsewhere, but still the alternative -- was
the Muslim Brotherhood, and no secular alternative was viable without the
Egyptian army.

The
Difficulties of an Intervention

There are tremendous military challenges to dealing
with Syria. Immaculate interventions will not work. A surgical strike on
chemical facilities is a nice idea, but the intelligence on locations is never
perfect, Syria has an air defense system that cannot be destroyed without
substantial civilian casualties, and blowing up buildings containing chemical
weapons could release the chemicals before they burn. Sending troops deep into
Syria would not be a matter of making a few trips by helicopter. The country is
an armed camp, and destroying or seizing stockpiles of chemical weapons is
complicated and requires manpower. To destroy the stockpiles, you must first
secure ports, airports and roads to get to them, and then you have to defend
the roads, of which there are many.

Eradicating chemical weapons from Syria -- assuming
that they are all in al Assad's territory -- would require occupying that
territory, and the precise outlines of that territory change from day to day.
It is also likely, given the dynamism of a civil war, that some chemical
weapons would fall into the hands of the Sunni insurgents. There are no
airstrikes or surgical raids by special operations troops that would solve the
problem. Like Iraq, the United States would have to occupy the country.

If al Assad and the leadership are removed, his
followers -- a substantial minority -- will continue to resist, much as the
Sunnis did in Iraq. They have gained much from the al Assad regime and, in
their minds, they face disaster if the Sunnis win. The Sunnis have much
brutality to repay. On the Sunni side, there may be a secular liberal
democratic group, but if so it is poorly organized and control is in the hands
of Islamists and other more radical Islamists, some with ties to al Qaeda. The
civil war will continue unless the United States intervenes on behalf of the
Islamists, uses its power to crush the Alawites and hands power to the
Islamists. A variant of this happened in Iraq when the United States sought to
crush the Sunnis but did not want to give power to the Shia. The result was
that everyone turned on the Americans.

That will be the result of a neutral intervention or
an intervention designed to create a constitutional democracy. Those who
intervene will find themselves trapped between the reality of Syria and the
assorted fantasies that occasionally drive U.S. and European foreign policy. No
great harm will come in any strategic sense. The United States and Europe have
huge populations and enormous wealth. They can, in that sense, afford such
interventions. But the United States cannot afford continual defeats as a
result of intervening in countries of marginal national interest, where it sets
for itself irrational political goals for the war. In some sense, power has to
do with perception, and not learning from mistakes undermines power.

Many things are beyond the military power of the
United States. Creating constitutional democracies by invasion is one of those
things. There will be those who say intervention is to stop the bloodshed, not
to impose Western values. Others will say intervention that does not impose
Western values is pointless. Both miss the point. You cannot stop a civil war
by adding another faction to the war unless that faction brings overwhelming
power to bear. The United States has a great deal of power, but not
overwhelming power, and overwhelming power's use means overwhelming casualties.
And you cannot transform the political culture of a country from the outside
unless you are prepared to devastate it as was done with Germany and Japan.

The United States, with its European allies, does
not have the force needed to end Syria's bloodshed. If it tried, it would
merely be held responsible for the bloodshed without achieving any strategic
goal. There are places to go to war, but they should be few and of supreme
importance. The bloodshed in Syria is not more important to the United States
than it is to the Syrians.

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A Born-Again Christian Conservative and Fundamentalist. A Republican with a very pro-defense, pro-US Cold War view of politics and the world. I also have, as a non-Jew, a Pro-Israel political and religious position as a born-again Christian Conservative.